Timo Sirainen wrote:

On Aug 7, 2008, at 2:49 PM, Stephen Feyrer wrote:

...

Hi anyone.

Can dovecot be configured to authenticate user using only SSL Certificates only and not ask for a password.

So far I've got it taking the username from the common name of the certificate but I like it to use the certificate in place of the password.

Is this possible and how?

If you're that far, then you're already authenticating the user against the certificate. Or assuming you have ssl_require_client_cert=yes. Then just create a passdb that accepts any password as valid for the user (nopassword=yes extra field).

In theory there's also this EXTERNAL SASL mechanism that could be used to log in without user/pass, but Dovecot doesn't currrently support that and I'm not aware of any clients supporting it either.

Hi Timo.

I have authenticating user against the certificate as you say and do have ssl_require_client_cert=yes.

I'm using PAM to authenticate against my user database at the moment. I'm still baffled... :)

-- kind regards

Stephen.

Hi Timo.

Thanks, I will persevere. I would like to point out that I'm only using PAM as it seems the best way to get email to system users. I am open to another method that might work.

This was my pam.d/imap file

Provided by mailbase (dont remove this line!)

Standard pam.d file for mail service packages.

$Header:

/var/cvsroot/gentoo-x86/net-mail/mailbase/files/common-pamd-include,v 1.1 2005/04/29 13:07:50 ticho Exp $

auth required pam_nologin.so auth include system-auth account include system-auth session include system-auth

My pam.d/imap file now looks like this.

Provided by mailbase (dont remove this line!)

Standard pam.d file for mail service packages.

$Header:

/var/cvsroot/gentoo-x86/net-mail/mailbase/files/common-pamd-include,v 1.1 2005/04/29 13:07:50 ticho Exp $

#auth required pam_nologin.so auth required pam_allow.so auth include system-auth account include system-auth session include system-auth

This fails the authentication.

While it looks like this it also fails authentication. (I just thought I'd give it a go.)

Provided by mailbase (dont remove this line!)

Standard pam.d file for mail service packages.

$Header:

/var/cvsroot/gentoo-x86/net-mail/mailbase/files/common-pamd-include,v 1.1 2005/04/29 13:07:50 ticho Exp $

auth required pam_nologin.so auth required pam_allow.so auth include system-auth account include system-auth session include system-auth

-- kind regards

Stephen.

Timo Sirainen wrote:

On Aug 7, 2008, at 5:33 PM, Stephen Feyrer wrote:

...

Timo Sirainen wrote:

...

On Aug 7, 2008, at 2:49 PM, Stephen Feyrer wrote:

...

Hi anyone.

Can dovecot be configured to authenticate user using only SSL Certificates only and not ask for a password.

So far I've got it taking the username from the common name of the certificate but I like it to use the certificate in place of the password.

Is this possible and how? If you're that far, then you're already authenticating the user against the certificate. Or assuming you have ssl_require_client_cert=yes. Then just create a passdb that accepts any password as valid for the user (nopassword=yes extra field). In theory there's also this EXTERNAL SASL mechanism that could be used to log in without user/pass, but Dovecot doesn't currrently support that and I'm not aware of any clients supporting it either.

Hi Timo.

I have authenticating user against the certificate as you say and do have ssl_require_client_cert=yes.

I'm using PAM to authenticate against my user database at the moment. I'm still baffled... :)

If you only want to allow users to log in with certificates, then just change the PAM configuration file to be something like (not tested, and my PAM knowledge isn't too good):

auth required pam_allow.so

Although it would be nice to be able to verify that the user still exists, but you could do that with certificate revocation lists also..